I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
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All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.
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The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
You’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.
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Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
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When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.
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I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
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After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
KAZUO ISHIGURO